U.S. Wargaming Grows Up: A Short History of the Diffusion of
Wargaming in the Armed Forces and Industry in the Postwar Period up to
1964

By

Sharon
Ghamari-Tabrizi

The author an independent scholar living in Atlanta.
She has a PhD in the history ofscience. She is currently finishing
a book on the techniques for planning
to fight, terminate, survive and
reconstruct from a thermonuclear war
developed at RAND in the 1950s.The
book, entitled "The Intuitive Science of the Unthinkable: Herman Kahn,
RAND, and Thermonuclear War" will be published in 2002.This article is a short appendix to a
chapter on war-gaming and man-machine simulation at RAND from the book
manuscript.

One
of the surprising findings of this research was how rapidly the practice was
accepted by the various services. In
less than a decade, war-gaming moved from being a little known adjunct to
operations research to attain the status of a controversial, but popular
exercise established in every service command and division.

The immediate precursor for Navy
cold war simulation gaming were the few games played by operations researchers
in the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG) and at the
Naval Ordnance Laboratory during WWII.In the first instance, a machine game was devised to simulate submarine
aerial surveillance and tactical evasion.[2]In the second case, a mining warfare game
was created by Ellis Johnson, chief of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory’s
countermeasures section.[3]Gaming was nonetheless not regarded as an
important technique of wartime naval operations research.[4]It was, however, a long-standing tradition
at the Naval War College, which had conducted map games since the late 19th
century.[5]More importantly, unlike the other
services, it continued to play manual wargames in the immediate post-war
period. While these practices were
called “map exercises,” in 1953 the term “war game” was reinstated at the Naval
War College with the inauguration of a program to develop a strategic
game. In May 1955, the Naval War
College instituted an annual week-long strategic game, an event which preceded
the establishment of the service-wide Navy War Games program and the War Gaming
Department at the School by several years.[6]The “School of Naval Warfare Strategic Game”
was a manual wargame which pitted the super-powers, Blue and Purple, against
one another in global political and military conflict.Naval War College game director Francis
McHugh explained, “It [was] a two-sided educational game with the emphasis on
decision-making at the national level.”[7]

The development of the
machine-simulation, the Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator (NEWS), was conceived
at the end of the war as a substitute for the manual games at the Naval War
College. Early in 1945, the construction
of a combat information center “trainer” at the University of California was
brought to the attention of officers in the Bureau of Ships, who passed on the
idea to the Naval War College. By
November 1945, the Chief of Naval Operations authorized the Bureau of Ships to
begin the development process on a navy warfare simulator.

Originally it was envisioned that the simulator would employ
electromechanical means for moving forces, establishing contacts and
disseminating intelligence, and would include appropriate communication
facilities. Thus, it would eliminate such cumbersome board techniques as
filling out move forms, plotting moves, juggling screens and curtains, etc.,
and permit time to be handled as a continuous rather than a discrete variable.[8]

The
NEWS was ready for the academic year 1957-58. The game was a two-sided, one-map
game with three major parts: maneuver and display, damage computer, which was
installed in 1958, and communications.[9]While the Command and Staff Department of
the college began to play game on the NEWS, the annual strategic war game
continued to be manually played until 1960.[10]As a sign of its growing significance, in
June 1959, a formal War Gaming Department was established at the Naval War
College. The following year a week long
wargaming course became required for all fleet officers, which focused on the
capabilities as well as the limitations of fleet gaming on the NEWS.[11]

Even though the NEWS had been
intended for training, McHugh noted that “it became apparent -- even during the
design and installation phases -- that the NEWS was a valuable tool for
exploring actual naval operations.”[12]It was understood that war-gaming could
provide training and operational information much more economically than
outlays for actual task force exercises.[13]Consequently, when the Chief of Naval
Operations established the Navy War Games Program in May 1958, the NEWS was
regarded as the chief resource for examining fleet and force exercises and
plans in advance of actual operations.[14]A separate computer analysis division was
also part of the program, which focused on a naval air defense war game played
on digital computers.[15]

In 1960, the Marine Corps introduced
wargames at its Marine Corps School in Quantico, VA.The Landing Force War Game was a two-sided, rigid, manual
research game. Its purpose was to analyze and develop tactics and new weapons
systems.[16]The Marine Corps Educational Center also
utilized an Amphibious Assault Trainer, in which “the student can see the
entire amphibious operation in miniature.”[17]

If we turn to Air Force gaming,
again we see the pattern of gaming on the margin of operations research during
WWII, and coming into central focus in the late 1950s.[19]More important to the history of Air Force gaming
was its long-standing familiarity with flight simulators.In 1951, the Air Force contracted with the
University of Chicago to create the Advisory Board for Simulation, (which was
later renamed the Institute for System Research,) in order to explore design
requirements of flight control systems.[20]Throughout the decade and into the next,
simulation laboratories were set up by the Air Force and its contractors to aid
in systems engineering problems, and train pilots and astronauts.[21]

Mathematicians at the RAND
Corporation devised the Air Battle Model I, (ABM) which was a simulation of
global nuclear war.[22]It was tested in the summer of 1955 at the
Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.According to Peter Perla, the game was “notorious for [its]
inability ... to deal with the attack and defense of navy carrier battle
groups.”[23]The ABM was transferred to the AF Director
of Plans in December 1957, which contracted with the civilian contractor,
Technical Operations Research, Inc. to finish the design work.[24]In 1957, Tech/Ops established the project
office OMEGA in order to translate the experimental design of the first model
into a functional simulation for staff officers.[25]That same year, the Air Force established
the Air Battle Analysis Center, a headquarters-level gaming office.(And, like the Navy, the Air Force
introduced wargaming into its curriculum at the Air Force Academy.[26])

Given its reliance on a weapons
systems complex, the Air Force was at the forefront of computer gaming. An article in the Air University Quarterly Reviewof Winter 1956-57 commented, “Indeed the speed with which these weapons
could react, each to the other, seemed to indicate that only a machine with
vast memory and instant response could be expected to indicate a successful
counter strategy in sufficient time to be useful.”[27]Within a year of this article’s publication,
the Air Force unveiled the SAGE system, which did indeed seem to promise the
automation of a nationally coordinated, computer-dependent defense. SAGE nicely
demonstrates the intertwining history of computer development, machine and
computer gaming, evolving business management practices with its theory of
organizational control, and industrial automation in this period.Perhaps the most significant Air Force
project for its effect on American defense and the economy in the 1960s,
SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground
Environment) was inaugurated in June 1957.[28]It was a network of digital command and
control computers located throughout the nation.The SAGE system monitored radar intelligence in Canada and the
United States, tracking friendly air traffic and, potentially, unidentified
incursions into North American airspace.Synthesizing radar information, it could automatically determine flight
speed and location, and tag potentially hostile incoming bombers for defensive
assault. It was a gigantic application
of the first generation of high-speed computers with magnetic core memories.The development of SAGE employed most of the
country’s existing cohort of programmers, and further particularized the
division of labor among them.[29](Analysts at the non-profit System
Development Corporation (a RAND spin-off) devoted approximately 1,800 man-years
devising SAGE’s programs.[30]
)

The application of SAGE systems
technology to commercial concerns was not lost on business journalists. A Fortunereporter, Gilbert Burck noted that, “SAGE simulates a large business
system with strategically located division offices, all bound together by an
information-and-control network.”[31]Recall that from the years 1957 through
1964, computer manufacturers faced the challenge of persuading corporate
managers that data processing technology could function as more than
bookkeeping devices. IBM salesmen and
systems engineers dedicated themselves to demonstrating the staggering
computational, simulatable, synthesizing and coordinating potentials of their
machine. Burck’s article, “‘On Line’ in
‘Real Time’” is a representative example of the brief historic moment in which
it was necessary to frame (in the most appealing way possible) the new
technologies of continuous information transmission, data storage and recovery
in light of the equally avant garde systems approach to corporate management.Burck made use of one of the prevailing leitmotifs of the historical
moment, namely the antagonism between primitive experience with its “guesses
and hunches” and the indomitable power
-- not to say omnipotence -- afforded to the rational, systems-oriented,
computer-reliant manager.

... after the business has become “computerized,” and the
records of its “transactions” over the years have been stored in the machine’s
memory... ... [the manager] knows precisely what has happened and why, what
should be happening and why, and he has an excellent notion of what is likely
to happen, and what is the best way of forfending or capitalizing on it all. He
can rely less and less on guesses and hunch and more and more on analysis....
the machine can help him expand and elevate his native intuitive powers to new
levels.[32]

Given
the public mood regarding automation, the notion of enhanced human cognitive
power wrought by the computer easily shifted to the fear of automated
decision-making. Burck reassured his
audience that the SAGE system was a paragon of man-machine
complementarity. “One big lesson it
teaches, aside from the fact that it puts the whole business on line in real
time, is how to manage the symbiosis of man and machine.SAGE matches the two easily and naturally,
letting the computer help rather than take over...”[33]

In addition to the SAGE system, the
Air Force made use of computer games for research into optimum targeting
strategy. In the summer of 1960, a
series of computer wargames were played at the AF chief of staff level to
investigate the outcomes of a Soviet first strike, and an American first
strike, with differing target lists.The result confirmed arguments that had begun to be aired by defense
analysts at RAND and other sites since the late 1950s -- namely, a strategy
which avoided cities and concentrated solely on the defense installations of
the enemy was the least catastrophic, most successful means of waging nuclear
war and surviving.[34]

Like the Navy, the Air Force
employed the spectrum of the modes of gaming as a means of training simulators
from field exercises to computer games.In the early and middle years of the 1950s, the Strategic Air Command
(SAC) and the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) staged joint annual
wargames. One enthusiast remarked that
these exercises achieved the “ultimate in short-range war-gaming.”

Probably no game involving actual force deployment is purer,
more easily evaluated in terms of system efficiency and training, nor offers
greater realism to the participants.Staffs at all levels are exercised against an opponent whose capability
and intentions are not, perfectly at least, known.The presentations are authentic; the decisions are authentic up
to the point of simulated weapon release (CONAD) or beyond (SAC).[35]

RAND Gaming

The
Air Force contractor, the RAND Corporation, played a significant role in the
development of war gaming, first by pioneering techniques, as well as helping
to diffuse them to the Air Force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State
Department, to universities and to corporations.RAND explored every mode of war-gaming described above, and in
many ways set the standard for the practices of other research groups and those
to follow later. Among the first
wargames played at RAND in the early 1950s was a an exercise called “COW”,
which had been designed by mathematicians.It was a multilateral cold war game involving 20 players (representing
20 states). The game was played with
reference to a mathematical model of international relations.An entry listing RAND’s wargaming activities
for the Army’s STAG Directory affirmed, “Despite grossly unrealistic
features, it demonstrated the possibility, in principle, of applying scientific
modeling methodology to a field as vague as the political arena.”[36]

Dissatisfied with COW’s quantitative
idiom, several behavioral scientists began experimenting with role-playing
crisis games. Four political exercises
were conducted at RAND between February 1955 and April 1956, involving a large
number of staff analysts. The experience was so compelling that RAND analysts
gave briefings about political exercises to the Air Force and JCS, to scholars,
and to the State Department. This
stimulated wide interest in the technique, and subsequent role-playing games
were tried out in many institutions.

In 1954, RAND constructed a war
gaming facility, Project SIERRA, to explore Air Force strategy in limited
war. The Project SIERRA wargames were
two-sided, manual games that incorporated economic and political variables into
the consideration of strategy, tactics, and logistics.[37]Over the decade, more than fifty limited war
games were played in the facility.

RAND also conducted a great many
rigid strategic games. SAW was the
first such game. Played in 1948 and
1949, SAW was an elaborately ambitious exercise. “The outcome was determined by
gross budgetary and weapons allocations. ... [Moreover] it considered ground
and naval action in addition to air operations.”[38]
The follow-on to SAW, STRAW (circa 1953), was a less comprehensive game.An atomic air warfare game, STRAW explored
the economic effects of bombardment to cities and industry.STRAW was played at the Air War
College. Its successor, SWAP (circa
1959), was subsequently introduced into the curriculum of the Air Force
Academy.

In the early 1950s, RAND analysts
played map exercises as part of the Air Force Penetration Studies, which
concerned themselves with a standard operations research problem, how to
increase the attrition of the enemy oncoming bombers with optimal air defense.This work to the development of the
Penetration Study Model, a computer game which was “essentially an aggregated
air defense model coded for computing machines, capable of evaluating large
scale strategic attacks on an enemy.”[39]Thousands of trials of the model were run on
RAND’s digital computer. Following upon
that, RAND analysts developed the Air Defense Model, which estimated attrition
in strategic air attacks. This evolved into the Air Battle Model, a computer
game that was ultimately adopted by the new Air Battle Analysis Division of the
Air Force in 1957.

RAND analysts also originated a
number of computer simulations that approximated automated strategic
planning. FLIOP, Flight Operations
Planning model, was a simulation designed for SAC, which determined the optimal
flight plan for any individual mission.On the basis of FLIOP and its successor models, in 1961, RAND began the
development of STRAT (Strategic Air Planner) for SAC, which would generate “a
rough-cut strike plan for the total strategic forces, using the IBM 7090
computer.”[40]Other computer simulations developed by RAND
included MUSTARD and QUICK COUNT, which calculated civilian and fallout
casualties, respectively. (MUSTARD and
QUICK COUNT were employed in the computer studies of the comparative advantages
of city versus counterforce targeting, referred to above.)

Finally, RAND was at the forefront
of man-machine simulation. Two
simulation laboratories were built in successive order in the 1950s which
explored the training and R&D potentials of fully realistic analogue
environments. The Systems Research
Laboratory was inaugurated in 1952 by a teams of behavioral scientists to
investigate the optimal training methods for improving group performance.The environment of the lab duplicated an
anti-aircraft defense center. It was a
one-sided game in which the players, the participants who role-played CONAD
officers, tracked simulated radar signals of incoming overhead flights into
North American airspace, identified hostile aircraft, and routed orders to
defensive forces. The series of tests
at the laboratory were so successful, that the Air Force spun off the group
into a separate non-profit corporations, the System Development Corporation,
whose purpose was to translate the findings of the man-machine experiments into
ongoing training programs.[41]The Logistic Simulation Laboratory was
directed to hypothetical logistics environments for the proposed ICBM missile
forces of the near-future. Rather than
training, the laboratory experiments were directed towards determining the most
effective management structure for future logistics operations.

The Army was the direct beneficiary
of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory’s operations research and gaming program
during the war. After the war, the
director of the Navy Laboratory, Ellis Johnson, was appointed to found an
operations research group to serve the Army.Unlike the Air Force’s main operations research group, RAND, which was a
civilian contractor, the Army established its Operations Research Office (ORO)
as an adjunct to the Johns Hopkins University.In 1950, a physics professor at George Washington University who was
consulting with ORO, George Gamow, created a manual game called Tin Soldier,
(played from 1951 to 1954.) Gamow is
credited with devising the first mathematical war game used for analytical as
opposed to tactical operations research.[43]

Alfred Hausrath, the one-time
director of military gaming for the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), the
successor civilian contractor for the Army, recounted the details of a little
known simulation developed at the ORO in 1948.(The simulation also served as a model for a Naval anti-aircraft guided
missile system.[44])Staff members of the Applied Physics
Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University worked in conjunction with the ORO
in its design. What resulted was a computer game.Hausrath asserted that its successor model, a study of the air
defense of North America, which was inaugurated in 1953, was the first computer
simulation in the history of operations research.[45]ORO also originated the first digital
computer game, CARMONETTE I, (played from 1956-60.)[46]

Given its importance to the host of
computer games of the 1960s and thereafter, it is worth taking a brief look at
CARMONETTE. CARMONETTE stood for
Computerized Monte Carlo Simulation.There were a series of CARMONETTE games, the first was a single
tank/anti-tank battle; CARMONETTE II included infantry (1960-65); CARMONETTE
III added armed helicopter support (1966-1970); CARMONETTE IV added
communications and night vision.[47]CARMONETTE simulated the activities of
individual soldiers in a company- or battalion- sized battle. The basic combat
options were deciding whether to move or stay still, to prepare to fire, to fire
or not to fire.[48]It compounded the individual trajectories of
each soldier into an integrated picture of the battle. The operations
researcher Richard Zimmerman commented, “The major problem is to design a model
of battle which can simulate typical or critical combat actions to test the
effectiveness of the proposed tank company.”[49]Writing the program for CARMONETTE was
exceptionally difficult, game designers
were compelled to tailor the possible combinations of moves to a small set of
alternatives representing the most likely or most compelling options. The
results were extremely rough. Zimmerman
cautioned that computer games would necessarily require the supplementation and
error checking provided by field experiments, “which themselves [were] at best,
‘reasonable’ approximations of combat conditions.”[50]He concluded that tactical war gaming and
field experiments should be regarded as “complementary components” of military
research.

In
August 1952, a conference was convened at Fort Monroe, Virginia to future
explore ORO’s potential for assisting the Army’s R&D program.The techniques of war-gaming were advanced
as an effective method for research and planning purposes.“The concept of analytical war gaming
crystallized; possible the idea was born at this conference.”Furthermore, it was decided that games
designed for different levels of the command hierarchy should be conducted in
order to enrich the service understanding of the range of warfare.[51]

Another Army-university contract was
let to The George Washington University’s Human Resources Research Office
(HumRRO). HumRRO’s task was to develop wargames for training staff
officers. “It was decided to
concentrate on procedures which could be used to teach the decisions which must
be made after combat, or movement toward combat, has been initiated. Gaming
material used at the Command and General Staff College was provided and the
staff began to work up examples of new ways to present this material in a game
setting.”[52]

The Continental Army Command (CONARC),
Combat Development Section, created its own operations research corps, the
Combat Operations Research Group (CORG) as a field office of the ORO, from 1952
until October 1955.[53]Wargaming was introduced into combat
development in 1954 with the development of a separate division for War
Gaming. Its first exercise was a
“pretest” of a massive field maneuver in the continental US (Sage Brush.)The War Games group gamed the war-plan of
the opposing side in order to try out unexpected moves.This first combination of combining
war-gaming and field exercises was highly successful.The Deputy Commanding General of the War Games Division, Lt.
General Gordon Rogers wrote, “Upon conclusion of the exercise, the maneuver
director ... stated that future field exercises should not be undertaken until
they had been thoroughly war gamed in advance...”[54]

The success of pretesting Sage Brush set the
pattern for CORG’s subsequent practices of combining gaming with controlled
field experiments.For example, in 1953
a field experiment was conducted specifically in order to provide data for a
CORG game called SYNTAC. Hausrath remarked, “Here was an example of a game that
established a requirement for field tests. The field tests in turn yielded data
that enabled the game to solve problems not previously within the capability of
operations research analytical study.”[55]The result became a standard resource for
subsequent conventional war games.SYNTAC continued to be used to examine tactical problems through the
middle 1950s, eventually acquiring computer support, making it the first Army
computer-aided research game.[56]

The ORO created
another gaming operation in order to generate data for its Intelligence
Division, called INDIGO (Intelligence Division Gaming Operation).INDIGO I was played in the spring and summer
of 1958.The data generated during the
game took two years to process. While INDIGO had originally been developed in
order to generate intelligence data, it subsequently became modified into a
general use tactical game called TACSPIEL.[57]TACPIEL was a “flexible, two-sided,
free-play, manually operated, rigidly assessed, computer-assisted,
division-level war game.”[58]It was oriented towards problems of ground
combat such as “mobility, fire-power, communications, logistics, combat
surveillance and target acquisition means, and air attack and defense.”[59]

In September 1961, the
Army established the Strategy and Tactics Group (STAG), under the supervision of
the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations.STAG was a headquarters level gaming
organization devoted to operational planning. Its games were generally
mathematical, and often played on orin
conjunction with computers.[60]On the other side of the gaming spectrum, the
Army also carried on the tradition of gaming with miniatures.The Combat Development Experimentation Center
(CDEC) constructed “one of the world’s largest terrain models.”[61]Following the practice of pretesting field
exercises with gaming, gamers at the CDEC planned the details of data collection
during field exercises at the Army’s field laboratory, Hunter Liggett Military
Reservation. The terrain model was a replica of the field laboratory.Hence it was hoped that there would be a
close fit between the gaming experiments and their realization in the field.
Moreover, at the end of the field exercises, the gamers would duplicate the
scenario and replay various points of the game “for reexamination of critical
and questionable areas.”[62]

In spite of the many
echelons of gaming in the various services, in 1961 the Joint Chiefs of Staff
established its own Joint Gaming Agency.A JCS official commented,

The Joint Gaming Group was
activated as a direct result of a recommendation made by a joint study group
working on some complex general war problems. After examining various other
analytical methods, the study group concluded that war gaming of the
particular problem areas under investigation was required in order to evaluate
the area more comprehensively. It was felt that Service war gaming was not
sufficiently responsive to JCS policy and control.[64]

In its first year, while the JGA mostly requested games
staffed by service personnel, the joint group did take part in the political
crisis exercises conducted during the Berlin crisis.In 1962, the JCS did begin the practice of
ordering war games in response to specific requirements for data. “War games ...
at the JCS level [were] used to analyze hypothetical situations as a part of
studies more widely than to test actual plans.”[65]The gaming group was divided into three
departments: General War, Limited War, and Cold War. “This organization was an
acknowledgment that the Joint Chiefs of Staff interests in war gaming reached
from one end of the conflict spectrum to the other.”[66]The following year, the group was reorganized
as the Joint War Games Agency, and doubled its staff from 15 to 34 persons.

The general war
division in conjunction with the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff
inaugurated an annual game of the current American strategic war plan. In order
to simulate the Soviet side of the encounter, the JCS established a Red Planning
Board, which devised a hypothetical first strike war plan.[67]The Red Planning Board consulted with
analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Military Command
Systems Support Center, the Services, and the unified and specific commands. In
light of the background materials supplied by these sources, and with reference
to “assumed Red national objectives as approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,”[68] the Red planning board
created a number of different first-strike war plans from which the annual game
would be devised.[69]

Whereas the general
war division commanded a great deal of support and was lauded as providing a
substantive contribution to planning and analysis, the limited war division did
not fare so well, nor was considered quite as effective. Rear Admiral Van
Arsdall, Jr. commented, “This situation is directly traceable to the inherent
uncertainties, the large number of variables and diversity of the forces
involved in limited war situations, and the emphasis throughout the late 1950s
on analyses of general nuclear wars.”[70]In the summer of 1962, the JSC authorized the
development for a limited war game that could simulate land, sea, and air
theater forces.

The Army’s Strategic
and Tactical Analysis Group was tasked to develop manual games for operational
analysis in theater commands.This
resulted in the Master Battle Model, TBM-63, in 1963. TBM-63 was directed
towards planning joint operations by the Joint Staff or Joint War Gaming group,
however it was far too complex to yield useful and consistent results.[71]

We must also briefly
mention NATO war games.The US Army
established a Special Weapons School for NATO forces in Oberammergau, West
Germany as an adjunct to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
This training center was focused on training forces to fight in an atomic
war.In 1953, the school developed an
Atomic Air-Ground War Game. Hausrath explained, “The game was to demonstrate
some basic principles of tactical air operations in land warfare keyed to the
tactical use of atomic weapons delivered by piloted aircraft in a limited or
localized situation. Close coordination of air and ground forces .. was stressed
in the game.”[72]The game was intended to train NATO forces
how to attack enemy army units and airfields with tactical atomic weapons while
“keeping from being annihilated.”(Hausrath added laconically, “An official report describing the purpose
and nature of the game included the statement: ‘No significance is to be
attached to the outcome of this game.’”[73])

Finally, it is worth
noting that in addition to simulating combat as such, specialized logistics games
were conducted by the various services to train, evaluate, or plan for force
support functions.The members of RAND’s
logistics department designed an “inventory management” game called MONOPOLOGS
in 1954.The Army staged an annual
logistics game including field exercises called LOGEX at Fort Lee from the early
1950s on.[74]Similarly, the Army Management School, which
had been established in 1954 at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, employed a series of
logistics games in its curriculum: FORT IRWIN (1958), FORT ROOT (1959), FORT
SIMULATION (1960), the last item of which was programmed for the computer in
1961.In 1957, the Army civilian contractor, RAC,
established a group specifically devoted to gaming logistics.By 1964, the logistics group had grown into a
full-scale Logistic Simulation Division, focusing on manual games and computer
simulations.[75]Army logistics games spanned the various
objectives of gaming, assessing current stock levels in warehousing and queuing
games, training logistics officers, and planning future supply and management
structures for possible operations or weapons systems.[76]The Army’s other civilian research group, the
ORO (which was still in operation, but parallel to RAC in function,) also staged
logistics game, such as LOGSIM-W, which was a simulation game jointly designed
by ORO consultants and officers of the Army Logistics Center at Fort Lee,
Virginia in 1958-59.[77]Hausrath remarked, “MONOPOLOGS, FORT
SIMULATION, LOGSIM-W and SIGMALOG represent games which were meeting grounds
between the military... and business and industry with its newly developed
interest in the gaming technique.”[78]

Indeed, war-gaming was
enthusiastically adopted by corporations and business schools almost at the same
moment that the technique began to diffuse throughout the services in the late
1950s. RAND’s inventory game, MONOPOLOGS appears to be one of the first
logistics games to capture the imagination of business leaders.When in 1956, the American Management
Association sought to translate war-game design into business games, it hired as
consultants and designers some members of the RAND logistics department. The AMA
assembled a research group consisting of its own officials, the RAND
consultants, operations analysts from management consulting firms, and
programming experts from IBM.The group
called upon the war gaming staff at the Naval War College for instruction and
suggestions.[80]With help from IBM, the AMA group designed a
model of idealized business transactions, which consisted of a series of
formulae that captured the decision structure relevant to the growth and
maturation of a firm. The resulting game, called “The Top Management Decision
Simulation,” was programmed for an IBM 650 computer, and presented to 20
corporation presidents in May 1957.Very
soon after, a computer-assisted game was created for the AMA Academy for
Advanced Management, which was featured in the AMA Management Development
Seminar and the Executive Decision Making Program. By March 1958, 350
corporation executives and 50 scientists and business school professors had
played the game, and had declared themselves to be enthusiastic admirers of the
technique.[81]

Like, war-gaming in
its many modes of simulation, the story of business gaming is one of a vogue,
and extraordinarily rapid diffusion.While the AMA game achieved an almost instantaneous fame, it was a
computer-assisted game.Corporate
executives clamored for a wholly manual, i.e. non-computer game.G. R. Andlinger and his associates in
McKinsey and Company, Inc. anticipated this need.Beginning in 1956, his team began to explore
translating operational role-playing game design into business scenarios,
resulting in the “Business Management Game,” which was released in 1957. In an
article in the Harvard Business Review , Andlinger asserted,

Business gaming is the first
promising attempt to provide this experience by simulating the real-life
operations of a business and forcing the participants to cope with the same
kind of problems that face the top management of a company....Operational
gaming is essentially simulation and thus provides a framework for making
trial-and-error decisions rather than for evolving an optimum strategy.[82]

He explained how simulation
could impart valuable skills to the player.“It forces an over-all point of view...The need to exercise judgment an
make decisions without ‘complete’ information is a powerful stimulus to mental
discipline, decisiveness, and a healthy willingness to take risks.”[83]Indeed, the
integrative experience afforded the by game was precisely the quality singled
out by a Vice-President of Sylvania’s Electronic Systems Division, who
remarked, “ I believe one of the real values of the course is that it forces
me to do more thinking about the interrelated aspects of my position and its
responsibilities.”[84]

Just as war-games were
used for training officers at their bases and in the war colleges, business
games were introduced into the curriculum of business schools. Thus, also in
1957, professors at the business school at the Carnegie Institute of
Technology,devised the “Carnegie Tech
Management Game” for use in the graduate curriculum. Similarly, that same year,
professors at the Graduate School of Business Administration at UCLA designed
the “UCLA Executive Decision Game.”[85]

In this same period,
just as the armed services gradually began to make use of simulations as part of
their evaluation and planning practices, -- in addition to training, --

a few corporations began to experiment with gaming and
simulation studies as a component of their operational planning.For example, as early as 1953, Lockheed
established a systems planning department in its headquarters which employed
electronic computers for such engineering tasks as computing trajectories,
working out optimal designs for space vehicles.Within the decade, Lockheed’sMissiles and Space Division achieved some notoriety for its management
games “that simulate[d] the business environment of the space industry; [in
which] management teams represent[ed] imaginary competitive companies whose
decisions [were] weighed by an appropriately instructed IBM [computer].”[86]Likewise, in 1958, General Electric
began to build a simulation laboratory which would duplicate all the operational
tasks of a production division, i.e., “forecasting, production scheduling,
inventory taking, distribution, and marketing.” The state-of-the-art IBM 704
computer was programmed to compute “more than a thousand interacting variables
-- things like prices, costs, stock levels, new orders, sales.”[87]By 1966, GE’s simulation laboratory had
become so integrated into its general planning procedure that a Naval Institute
article that defended “the validity of war game analysis” commented casually,
“Gaming before production has become accepted as an essential tool to management
planning in much of industry.”[88]Some numbers will bear this out.Hausrath gives the following data:

• A Remington Rand Univac Survey reported that by
August 1960, executives in 95 companies reported that business games were in
use at their firm.[89]

• The Boeing Airplane Company had incorporated games
into its training program, by mid-1959, more than 2,000 management trainees
had played a business game.

• In 1960, more than 3,600 employees had played
Minneapolis-Honeywell’s in-house exercise, “Top Brass Game; 250 executives had
played the Pillsbury in-house game.

• By mid-1961, more than 15,000 lower and middle-level
managers in the Bell Telephone Company had played the American Telegraph and
Telephone Company’s financial management game.

•Moreover,
executives went to the Army Management School for training: in September 1960,
600 men played the Army’s logistic simulation LOGSIM;264 others played the game FORT
SIMULATION.[90]

Commander Donald C Curran, “Educational War Games Played on
the Navy Electronic Warfare Simulator” in Murray Greyson, ed., Second War Gaming
Symposium Proceedings, Washington Operations Research Council, Washington
DC, March 16, 17 1964.

Almon E. Daniels, “The User’s Viewpoint on the Creation and
Application of a Large Simulation Model,” in John Overholt, First War Gaming
Symposium Proceedings, November 30, 1961, Washington Operations Research
Council, Washington DC, February 1962.

Commander John B Davis, Jr. and Dr. John A Tiedeman, “The
Navy War Games Program,” Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, June 1960.

Joseph H. Engel, “Operations Research for the U.S. Navy
Since World War II,” Operations Research, Vol. 8, no. 6, November-December
1960.

Leon Feldman, “Role of the Contractor and the User in Air
Force War Gaming” in Murray Greyson, ed., Second War Gaming Symposium Proceedings, Washington
Operations Research Council, Washington DC, March 16, 17 1964.

United States Army, Strategy and Tactics Analysis Group
(STAG), Directory of
Organizations and Activities Engaged or Interested in War Gaming, Defense
Documentation Center for Scientific and Technical Information, Cameron Station,
Alexandria Virginia, no date but probably 1962.

[1]The STAG Directory lists the following
departments of the Navy or its civilian contractors that had conducted war-games
by 1961: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; Naval War College; Operations
Evaluation Group, Office of Chief of Naval Operations; US Naval Weapons
Laboratory, Dahlgren; US Naval Research Laboratory; Institute of Naval Studies;
US Naval Command Systems, Support Activity, US Naval Weapons Plans; Planning
Analysis Group, The Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University;
Logistics Research Project, The George Washington University. United States
Army, Strategy and Tactics Analysis Group (STAG), Directory of
Organizations and Activities Engaged or Interested in War Gaming, Defense
Documentation Center for Scientific and Technical Information, Cameron Station,
Alexandria Virginia, no date but probably 1962. STAG had sent out a survey about
interest in and extent of war-gaming to all services, non-profit contractors,
and the defense industry. The directory resulted from the findings of the
survey.

[4] It was only in the late
1950s that a course, “Introduction to War Games” was added to the operations
analysis curriculum of the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Francis McHugh, Fundamentals of Wargaming, United States Naval War
College, Newport, Rhode Island, Third Edition, March 1966, page 4-3. Also see
Joseph H. Engel, “Operations Research for the U.S. Navy Since World War II,” Operations
Research, Vol. 8, no. 6, November-December 1960.

[5] For the history of
gaming at the Naval War College see McHugh, op. cit., pages 2-42-2-58.

[6]For a description of Naval War College board
games, see ibid., pages 4-10 to 4-24; for the description of a submarine
tactical game, see ibid., pages 4-24-4-27.

[14]Commander John B Davis, Jr., and Dr. John A
Tiedeman, “The Navy War Games Program,” Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, June 1960, Vol.
86, no. 6., page 63. The new department was called OP-06C, the Office of the
Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations for Naval War Gaming Matters. The
Navy also built analogue simulators in addition to the NEWS.For example, see “Ship motion simulator
planned for Polaris,” Aviation Week, Vol. 66, April 29, 1957; “Major parts
being mated for Polaris ship simulator,” Aviation Week,, Vol. 68, February 17, 1958; “Simulator
cutting asw [anti-submarine warfare] training costs,” Aviation Week, Vol.
77, September 24, 1962.

[19]One continuity between wartime operational
research and later simulation was the orientation towards the system totality.
Leroy A. Brothers describes the experiences of the Air Force operations analysts
who worked with the Eighth Bomber Command in England in September 1942. He
remarked, “The new analysts recognized at once that, in effect, the general had
given them the whole bomber command as their laboratory.” Leroy A. Brothers,
“Operations Analysis in the United States Air Force,” Journal of the
Operations Research Society of America, Vol. 2, no. 1, February 1954, page
2. Also see Dr. James E. Lipp, “Development Planning -- Operational Research
Aspects,” and Dr. Joseph F. McCloskey, “Organization for Operations Research in
the United States,” in Max Davies, Michael Verhulst, eds., Operational Research in
Practice, Pergamon Press, London, 1958.

[22]There is some confusion about the year the
project was initiated. Leon Feldman
wrote, “The RAND Corporation in 1952 began research which led to the design of
the Strategic Operations Model (later renamed Air Battle Model I), a detailed
simulation of global air war.” “Role of the Contractor and the User in Air Force
War Gaming” in Murray Greyson, ed., Second War Gaming Symposium Proceedings, Washington
Operations Research Council, Washington DC, March 16, 17 1964, page 107.On the other hand, Almon E. Daniels wrote,
“Based upon some of the experience at RAND and stimulated by the interest of the
Air Force Intelligence organization, the first research version of the Air
Battle Model was completed and exercised at RAND in the summer of 1957 and then
delivered to Headquarters, United States Air Force.” Almon E. Daniels, “The
User’s Viewpoint on the Creation and Application of a Large Simulation Model,”
in John Overholt, First War Gaming Symposium Proceedings, November 30, 1961,
Washington Operations Research Council, Washington DC, February 1962, page
85. The original Air Battle Model consisted of “a plan converter,” i.e.,
instructions for translating war plans into programming language, the Air Battle
Model, and the output programs.Garry
Brewer and Martin Shubik, The War Game: A Critique of Military Problem Solving,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979, page 130.

[23]Peter Perla, op. cit., page 123.Daniels moves this up to the summer of
1957.

[26]The RAND games, STRAW 1953, SWAP, 1959, and
SAFE 1962 were introduced into the curriculum of the first class at the Air
Force Academy. E. W. Paxson, War Gaming, RM-3489-PR, RAND, February 1963, page
17.

[31]He elaborated the analogy, “This network, in
effect, not only keeps the home office instantaneously aware of regional and
system fluctuations in sales, costs, inventories, and profits, but takes the
necessary steps to correct imbalances.” Gilbert Burck, “The Boundless Age of the
Computer,” Fortune, Vol. 69, no. 3, March 1964,page 108.

[34]Richard Fryklund, “War ‘Waged’; Air Force
Computers Back Theory of Hitting Only Military Targets,” Los Angeles Times,
Sunday January 15, 1961, Section C, pages 1-3. It should be emphasized, however,
that the target list exceeded 2500 separate entities in 1960. While the Fryklund
article was based on an interview with AF Chief of Staff General Thomas White,
SAC Commander General Thomas Power was hostile to reducing the target list to
purely “counterforce” [ie military] targets. “When RAND strategist William
Kaufmann visited SAC headquarters in the winter of 1961 to present a briefing on
his ongoing study of counterforce, Power reacted with an angry cable to Chief of
Staff White. The SAC commander wanted it made perfectly clear that Kaufmann’s
arguments did not reflect the current or future thrust of Air Force thinking.”
David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” International
Security, Vol. 7, no. 4, Spring 1983, page 67.

[41]See Claude Baum, The System Builders:
The Story of SDC, System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, California,
1981.

[42]The STAG Directory lists the following Army
offices and civilian contractors involved in war-gaming in 1961: Army War
College; Army Command and General Staff College; Army Air Defense School; Army
Artillery and Missile School; Army Chemical Corps School HQ; Continental Army
Command; Seventh US Army; Eighth US Army; Army Air Defense Command; Army
Ordnance Missile Command; Army Combat Development Experimentation Center; Army
Electronic Proving Ground; Ballistics Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving
Ground; Army Security Agency Board; Army Chemical Corps Board, Board Army
Chemical Center; Chief of Transportation, Department of the Army; Office of the
Quartermaster General, Department of the Army; Army Aviation School, Fort
Rucker; Army Ordnance Guided Missile School, Redstone Arsenal; CBR Weapons
Orientation Course, Dugway Proving Ground; HQ, Army Alaska; HQ, Army Ordnance
Weapons Command; Army Logistics Management Center, Fort Lee; Army Signal Air
Defense Engineering Agency, Fort George G. Meade; USAMEDS Combat Development
Group, Brooke Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston; Strategic Planning Group, Corps
of Engineers, Army Map Service; Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Walter
Reed Army Medical Center; Human Resources Research Office, The George Washington
University; Combat Operations Research Group; Research Analysis Corporation;
Systems Research Group, Inc.; Management Research Group (Army Logistics Research
Project), The George Washington University; Planning Research Corporation, Los
Angeles.

[43]Tin Soldier was made “operable” in 1952.Alfred Hausrath, Venture Simulation in
War, Business, and Politics, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1971, page
65.

[44]Hausrath noted that the air defense model was
programmed on and for the first model of the Univac computer. ibid., page 192,
footnote 1.

[45]One might argue that RAND Monte Carlo
problems performed in the early 1950s might vie for the status of being the
first computer wargame. One of the designers of the air-defense simulation, R.
P. Rich, offered a paper describing the benefits of non-computer analogue
simulators as well as war-games in a paper presented at the Session “On the Use
and Value of War Game Methods in Solving Operations Research Problems” at the
annual meeting of the Operations Research Society, on November 20, 1954. In the
paper Rich defined a wargame as “just a special type of simulator, with the
opposing teams so many parts of the machine.” R.P. Rich, “Simulation as an Aid
to Model Building,” Journal of Operations Research, Vol. 3, no. 1, 1955,
page 15.

[51]From 1952 through to 1961, ORO operations
researchers struggled to maintain their analytic independence against the Army’s
service bias. In 1955, the Army terminated its contract with ORO, and
established the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC) as a single-patron
non-profit research corporation. ORO’s director, Ellis Johnson complained, “The
Army has wanted to run the research -- and that we couldn’t tolerate.” (From
article in Missiles
and Rockets, June 5, 1961, page 11. Cited in James R. Schlesinger,
“Quantitative Analysis and National Security,” World Politics,
Vol. 15, no. 2, January 1963, page 313, footnote 17. Also see, Ellis Johnson,
“The Long-Range Future of Operational Research,” Operations
Research, Vol. 8, January-February 1960.) The last major ORO project was the
fourth of its series of reviewing continental air defense. ORO was finally shut
down on August 31, 1961. Its work was transferred in tototo RAC.RAC’s contract with the Army extended from 1951 through September 1972.
Brewer and Shubik, op. cit., page 66. Also see W. L. Whitson, “The Growth of The
Operations Research Office in the U.S. Army,” Operations
Research, Vol. 8, no. 6, November-December 1960.

[53]See Dr. F. C. Brooks and Colonel L. W.
Merriam, “CORG Plans Tomorrow’s Army Today,” ARMY,February 1956. Relevant publications from
CORG are: War Gaming
Manual, 1 March 1956, SECRET; John P Young, A brief history of war
gaming,October 18, 1955; James B
Hodgson, Jr., Hexpiel, An essay at a large unit Tactical War Game,
CORG-M-57, January 12,1957; James Hodgson, A Generalized Analysis
of War Gaming, CORG-M-66, April 5, 1957. When ORO’s contract was terminated,
the civilian contractor, Technical Operations, Inc. assumed the supervision of
CORG. A fire at the CORG office destroyed all the records including the first 25
staff memoranda.Hausrath’s account was
based on the memory of CORG veteran members. Hausrath, op. cit., page
69.

[59]ibid. Also see Edward Girard et al., TACSPIEL War Game
Procedures and Rules of Play, (U), RAC-TP-111, Research Analysis
Corporation, November 1963, SECRET.

[60]The STAG directory noted that in 1962, a
liaison officer of the US Army Chemical Corps would placed on duty to the CONARC
War Games Division in order to help integrate chemical and biological warfare
into CONARC games. STAG Directory, op. cit., page 41.

[63]The STAG Directory listed the following
war-gaming activities associated with the Joint Service Agencies as of 1961:
Joint War Games Control Group, Joint Chiefs of Staff; Staff Commander in Chief,
Pacific; Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe; Weapons Systems Evaluation
Group, Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering; Research and
Analysis Division, Defense Atomic Support Agency.Also see George E. Pugh, “Operations Research
for the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Operations
Research, Vol. 8., no. 6, November-December 1960.

[69]“Our board .. assumes the role of Red
planners and attempts to apply the estimated Red force in an integrated
hypothetical war plan. These plans are not held forth as the wayRed will use his forces. Rather, it is merely
stated that the plans are onerational,
militarily feasible way in which Red could use his forces.” ibid., page 123.

[81]Among the corporation presidents who played
the game were Don Mitchell of Sylvania who declared “I’d like to play it once a
year,”; Alfred Perlman of the New York Central [Railroad], Patrick McGinnis of
the Boston & Maine; Wayne Holman Jr. of Chicopee Mills. John McDonald and
Franc Ricciardi, “The Business Decision Game,” Fortune, Vol. 57,
no. 3, March 1958, page 140.